Memories, Dreams, Reflections Quotes

“As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know.”
― Carl Gustav Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the whole moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook on life. That I feed the hungry, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ -- all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren, that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least among them all, the poorest of all the beggars, the most impudent of all the offenders, the very enemy himself -- that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness -- that I myself am the enemy who must be loved -- what then? As a rule, the Christian's attitude is then reversed; there is no longer any question of love or long-suffering; we say to the brother within us "Raca," and condemn and rage against ourselves. We hide it from the world; we refuse to admit ever having met this least among the lowly in ourselves.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life. They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success of money, and remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have attained what they were seeking. Such people are usually confined within too narrow a spiritual horizon. Their life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning. If they are enabled to develop into more spacious personalities, the neurosis generally disappears.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“Nights through dreams tell the myths forgotten by the day.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interests upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance. Thus we demand that the world grant us recognition for qualities which we regard as personal possessions: our talent or our beauty. The more a man lays stress on false possessions, and the less sensitivity he has for what is essential, the less satisfying is his life. He feels limited because he has limited aims, and the result is envy and jealousy. If we understand and feel that here in this life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change.”
― Carl Gustav Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“My whole being was seeking for something still unknown which might confer meaning upon the banality of life.”
― Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“We no longer live on what we have, but on promises, no longer in the present day, but in the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will at last bring the proper sunrise. We refuse to recognize that everything better is purchased at the price of something worse; that, for example, the hope of grater freedom is canceled out by increased enslavement to the state, not to speak of the terrible perils to which the most brilliant discoveries of science expose us. The less we understand of what our [forebears] sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Neitzche called the spirit of gravity. (p.236)”
― Carl Gustav Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away—an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.”
― Carl Gustav Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force.”
― Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“The sight of a child…will arouse certain longings in adult, civilized persons — longings which relate to the unfulfilled desires and needs of those parts of the personality which have been blotted out of the total picture in favor of the adapted persona.”
― Carl Gustav Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“The meaning of my existence is that life has addressed a question to me. Or, conversely, I myself am a question which is addressed to the world, and I must communicate my answer, for otherwise I am dependent upon the world’s answer.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. For I observed clearly that it was he who spoke, not I. He said I treated thoughts as if I generated them myself, but in his view thoughts were like animals in the forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air, and added, “If you should see people in a room, you would not think that you had made those people, or that you were responsible for them.” It was he who taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche. Through him the distinction was clarified between myself and the object of my thought. He confronted me in an objective manner, and I understood that there is something in me which can say things that I do not know and do not intend, things which may even be directed against me.”
― Carl Gustav Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity.”
― Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“The dream shows the inner truth and reality of the patient as it really is: not as I conjecture it to be, and not as he would like it to be, but as it is.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“I early arrived at the insight that when no answer comes from within to the problems and complexities of life, they ultimately mean very little. Outward circumstances are no substitute for inner experience.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“Among the so-called neurotics of our day there are a good many
who in other ages would not have been neurotic-that is, divided
against themselves. If they had lived in a period and in a milieu in
which man was still linked by myth with the world of the ancestors,
and thus with nature truly experienced and not merely seen from
outside, they would have been spared this division with themselves.
I am speaking of those who cannot tolerate the loss of myth and
who can neither find a way to a merely exterior world, to the world
as seen by science, nor rest satisfied with an intellectual juggling
with words, which has nothing whatsoever to do with wisdom.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“It was only after the illness that I understood how important it is to affirm one’s own destiny. In this way we forge an ego that does not break down when incomprehensible things happen; an ego that endures, that endures the truth, and that is capable of coping with the world and with fate. Then, to experience defeat is also to experience victory. Nothing is disturbed—neither inwardly nor outwardly, for one’s own continuity has withstood the current of life and of time. But that can come to pass only when one does not meddle inquisitively with the workings of fate. I”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“companionship thrives only when each individual remembers his individuality and does not identify himself with others.”
― Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“the goal of psychic development is the self. There is no linear evolution; there is only a circumambulation of the self.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“Nothing so promotes the growth of consciousness as [the] inner confrontation of opposites.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“The doctor is effective only when he himself is affected.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“Anything can be settled by an intellect that is not subject to the control of feeling—and yet the intellectual still suffers from a neurosis if feeling is undeveloped.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“The essential thing is to differentiate oneself from these unconscious contents by personifying them, and at the same time to bring them into relationship with consciousness. That is the technique for stripping them of their power.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“at this moment I came upon myself. Previously I had existed, too, but everything had merely happened to me. Now I happened to myself. Now I knew: I am myself now, now I exist. Previously I had been willed to do this and that; now I willed.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“Whenever there is a reaching down into innermost experience, into the nucleus of personality, most people are overcome by fear and many run away….The risk of inner experience, the adventure of the spirit, is in any case alien to most human beings. The possibility that such experience might have psychic reality is anathema to them.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“In general, emotional ties are very important to human beings. But they still contain projections, and it is essential to withdraw these projections in order to attain to oneself and to objectivity. Emotional relationships are relationships of desire, tainted by coercion and constraint; something is expected from the other person, and that makes him and ourselves unfree. Objective cognition lies hidden behind the attraction of the emotional relationship; it seems to be the central secret. Only through objective cognition is the real coniunctio possible.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“But what a dreary world it would be if the rules were not violated sometimes!”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“Uniqueness and limitation are synonymous”
― Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections